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Panic clamped its arms around Jordan’s chest and squeezed. She made a mewling sound and flicked her eyes from one tree to the next. Bree. Bree was gone.
‘Taffy’s not barking anymore,’ Karel whispered, still clinging to Jordan’s hand.
A shake of the head. ‘I don’t think it was Taffy.’
Karel turned his head and looked at her with eyes so wide Jordan wanted to burst into tears and fall on her knees, wrap her arms around the little boy, and sob against him.
But that wouldn’t find his sister. They had to find Bree. Forcing herself to stop panting, hyperventilating, Jordan stood where she was, straining her ears. She worked her mouth.
‘Bree!’ she screamed. ‘Bree, come back!’
Her voice fell flat in the forest’s silence, and Jordan had to press her lips together to keep them from trembling. She had to be brave. Karel was tucked against her side, hiding his face from the trees.
There was no answer from their sister. Just the thick silence. It wasn’t natural for a forest to be quiet like this. Nothing moved, nothing stirred, no breeze crept along the leaves, rustled in the undergrowth. No birds hopped from branch to branch, leaning down to scold little brown skinks among the deadfall. There were no birds, and Jordan was willing to bet that there were no skinks either, and any that wandered into this area were eaten.
Pressing a dirty palm against her mouth, Jordan wished she hadn’t thought that. Eaten. That’s what was going to happen to Bree if they didn’t find her. Might even happen to her and Karel as well, if they didn’t get out of this bit of the forest soon.
There were more of the strange stick sculptures, and she counted five of them before the gloom swallowed up the distance. They looked like a giant had tried to make tepees with some of the spindlier trees. Or maybe they were just making star shapes, asterisks.
Whatever the structures were, they weren’t natural, and Jordan cringed as she tugged Karel along under them. Something lived in this part of the forest, and she really, really didn’t want to meet it.
She thought about the diary Karel had found, and the symbol the writer – her however-many-greats-great-granddad – had scrawled on one of the pages, when he’d quit writing in English. She didn’t know much Chinese, just enough to read the tiniest bit, and she couldn’t write any. But Jordan’s mother’s family had been in this country for generations. Since the gold rushes. Which was entirely the reason why she was creeping through the forest looking for her sister and her dog.
The symbol had been the Chinese word for demon.